The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation (JNAF) Collection housed inside Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) is significant to Mumbai's cultural landscape as it includes around 800 works of modern and contemporary art from the country. This collection along with the Herwitz collection at the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Massachusetts will be the subject of discussion at a talk series titled Mind the Dash.

The first talk this Friday will be moderated by gallerist Mortimer Chatterjee and will have in conversation Dr Zehra Jumabhoy, UK-based art historian, Dr Siddhartha Shah, curator of Indian and South Asian Art at PEM, and Puja Vaish, director of JNAF. "The series is conceptualised to create a dialogue between museums and scholars of how Indian art may be viewed in current local and global contexts," Vaish says. She highlights that there were very few collections that were built around the decades post-Independence, since the art world was still in a nascent stage, even with respect to collections being made public. These two collections then, she adds, "hold within them works of artists reflecting not only the creative impulses of the time in response to significant events in the nation's history, but also the way these were being received and [how they] were creating socio-political discourses and shaping art history."